by A. L. Knorr
Remembering Sark stoked a familiar anger in the pit of my stomach.
I wouldn’t call myself a hateful or even vengeful person normally, but what he did to Jackie stirred a dark and fierce place in my heart. It was made all the worse by knowing he’d escaped. He’d been a little the worse for wear, sure, but after all the turmoil and pain he caused it was cosmically unjust that he’d snuck away to lick his wounds as I battled the demon he unleashed. Just remembering his sneering, cruel lips, his leering, hateful eyes …
The same eyes I’d seen at Heathrow today.
The realization hit me like a punch to the stomach, and I sagged back against the loveseat exhaling heavily.
“What?” Jackie half rose from the couch. “Ibby, what’s wrong?”
“Sark,” I rasped, my mouth suddenly dry. “I think I might have seen him today.”
Jackie’s whole body went rigid, like a terrified rabbit, then she was up on her feet. Her fingers curled into claws.
“Where?” she snarled. “Where did you see him?”
Her eyes settled on me, and I was a little alarmed at the rage in her eyes.
“At Heathrow,” I began but then quickly added, “I’m not sure it was him … I just saw someone who might have been him. A shabby-looking man. He was staring at me, but I only saw him for a second.”
I watched Jackie as she worked hard to compose herself, to get control of the anger and fear she was feeling. Gradually, her hands relaxed.
“You should call Dary,” she said, finally. “Maybe she’s seen Sark. This seems like an emergency to me.”
Daria, or Dary, was an old flame of Lowe’s, my friend, mentor, and a ghost. She was a complicated, not-quite-human freelance provocateur, who’d saved my life more than once. On parting company, she’d left a means to get in touch with her. She’d been emphatic, though––she was only to be contacted in the case of an emergency, both for her safety and ours.
“Okay,” I nodded, but then we jumped as a harsh, electronic buzz shattered the silence.
Jackie swore savagely as she snatched her phone off the coffee table. I pressed a hand to my chest, as though I could slow the hammering of my heart.
“Pietr, you bloody knob,” Jackie growled as she jabbed at her screen with a thumb. “I told you I’d give you the griddle tomorrow.”
Pietr lived in a flat down the hall, and he happened to have an electric griddle big enough for me to make kisra on. Jackie had learned this fact because, even though he was twice her age, he’d offered to make crepes for her once. Jackie had turned him down on the crepes because he said he would make them after they spent the night together, but had remembered when I had asked where we might find an electric griddle. Pietr, probably still sour over Jackie turning him down, had been slow to hand over the griddle, and now seemed eager to get it back.
“It’s clean,” I grumbled, turning toward the kitchen. “I’ll get it.”
“No, I’ll get it,” Jackie huffed, still glaring at her phone. “You need to call Dary.”
I was too tired to argue, so I shuffled toward the room I shared with Jackie. In the back of the overburdened closet was a small lockbox with a combination lid. I drew out the box, thumbed in the combination, and opened it. Inside was a plastic bag where a phone lay in three pieces. I drew out the body of the phone and connected the flat, square battery and the thick rectangular antennae, just the way I’d been shown, and then waited for the analog screen to come to life.
I winced as a heavy rap sounded at our front door.
Did he have to knock like a gorilla trying to knock bananas out of a tree? It played hell on my nerves and might wake Uncle Iry. I heard Jackie heft the griddle and curse under her breath as the screen came to life. I thumbed number one and hit send, then thumbed number two and hit send again. I held the phone to my ear. Sounds of static crackled and popped, then there was the sound of ringing. I heard our flat door open and Jackie’s voice sharp with irritation.
“If you’re calling this number there better be a good reason,” Daria’s voice came over the line, cold and flat. “Leave a message and I’ll—”
A gong-like crash followed by a cry of pain resounded from the front of the flat.
The phone tumbled from my fingers, and I raced toward the sound.
“Bastard!” Jackie shrieked, and another metallic thump drew an agonized scream, a bit weaker this time.
“Jackie!” I shouted as the bangles slipped off of my arms and into my hands with a thought. I wanted to be ready, but nothing could have prepared me for what I saw.
Jackie straddled the doorway, wielding the electric griddle like a battle-axe, chopping down on a man who cowered on the ground. For a heartbeat, I thought it was Pietr, but as he cringed away from another blow, I saw his face. Sark’s haggard and grimy visage, just as I’d seen it at Heathrow, looked up at Jackie in mortal terror.
It would have been hilarious if not for the fact that Jackie seemed within inches of beating him to death with Pietr’s griddle.
4
Sark turned out to have more fight in him than he’d looked.
One foot snaked out and caught Jackie’s leg.
Jackie didn’t topple, thanks to her training, but she did pause as she shifted her weight to her back leg. Capitalizing on the momentary reprieve, Sark threw up a hand and, like it had been swatted by an invisible sledgehammer, the griddle flew from Jackie’s grip into the hallway. Unimpressed by his display of Inconquo prowess, Jackie fell on him with a flurry of pounding fists and flying elbows.
I stood in the living room, my bangles dangling from my fingers, the two of them so entangled I held off launching my own attack.
“Jackie!” I shouted. “Out of the way!”
My instructions drew Jackie’s attention from her abuse of Sark’s ribs and upraised forearms, and Sark, opportunistic as ever, snatched a fist full of her T-shirt. Jackie snarled and lunged to smash his exposed face, but Sark used her momentum to send her rolling over the top of him.
Jackie hit the hallway floor, hard. With a grunt, she sprang into a crouch. Sark, his eyes wide with terror scuttled backwards like a ragged crab into our flat. He opened his mouth, but before more than a syllable was out, I let fly with the bangles.
The copper hoops spun through the air, stretching and thinning like they were melting in a centrifuge. By the time they reached Sark, they’d become two thin strands of copper. One wrapped around his chest and arms, while the other curled around his legs. With a reflexive mental effort, the ends of the bands clicked together, and Sark was securely bound.
No longer able to use his hands or feet, he crashed to the floor with a winded squawk. He landed on his shoulder and gave a sharp hiss, writhing on the floor like a worm next to a flame.
Jackie pounced on him, hammering at his face with her fists. For a second, I stood stunned, unable to tear myself away from the horrible expression written lividly across Jackie’s face. By the time I shook off my bewilderment, I realized Sark had stopped trying to cringe away from the blows. His head lolled around in a sickening boneless way after each punch.
“Jackie!” I shouted. When she didn’t stop, I rushed over and grabbed her by the shoulder. “Jackie, stop!”
My best friend in the world whirled around, letting Sark flop nervelessly to the floor, her hands raised. I thought she was about to box me, but a heartbeat later, she was staring at her hands. Sark’s blood covered them, but the fury of her blows had opened red tears in her skin. Jackie and Sark’s blood mingled across her knuckles and lay spattered across the front of her shirt.
“I-I-I,” Jackie stammered, still gaping at her hands. “I’m sorry.”
“Wash your hands,” I said, a bit more sharply than I intended. “Someone must have heard all that.”
Jackie shambled toward the kitchen, never having raised her eyes from her crimson fists.
I looked down at Sark. For a second, I thought he was dead. In that second, my mind whirled through a kaleidoscope of feeling
s, some of which surprised me. I’d always expected some kind of incredible guilt would come crashing in at having been part of a person’s death, like a huge moral wrecking ball, but that wasn’t what I felt. There was disbelief (can he really be dead?), and a bit of panic (how do I get rid of a dead body?), but no guilt, no horror at what had happened. In that second, my mind accepted that Sark was a bad man, a killer. He’d come for me and Jackie, and now he was dead. Simple. Cold? Yes. But frighteningly simple.
Then I saw his chest rise. Another breath and his right eye rolled groggily toward me. The left side of his face was battered, the eye swollen shut. His good eye shone with dull recognition and not much else, so though Sark was alive, he was barely hanging onto consciousness.
Something drew my gaze past our open front door, and I groaned aloud. Laying in the hallway was a heap of humanity and polyester that was Pietr. Leaving Sark to bleed on our floor, I rushed to check on our fallen neighbour. I was thankful to see he was still breathing, but he sported a nasty knock on the back of the head that had seeped blood onto the collar of his windbreaker. I gently rolled him over and saw a lump on his forehead, already the shade of aubergine.
I shook him, but he only managed a weak groan.
“Oh bollocks!” Jackie growled from the apartment. I looked up and saw her drying her hands as she watched me from our doorway. “Is he going to be okay?”
“I don’t know.” I shot a look up and down the hallway. “But unless you want the police asking about him in a few minutes, you’d better get over here and help me.”
I slid my hands around one of the stout man’s beefy arms, and Jackie tossed the towel and did the same. Together we hauled him into our apartment, closing the door after retrieving the skillet from the hallway. We moved Pietr into the living room, skirting Sark, who lay watching us with a dumb, one-eyed stare. It was a chore to drag Pietr up onto the couch, but we managed despite him being a hundred kilos of dead weight.
“Now what?”
I met her wide-eyed stare with one of my own and then threw up my arms.
“How the bloody hell should I know?”
Jackie winced at the outburst, a hurt look coming into her eyes, but I was too bewildered and scared to care much.
“We can’t just leave Sark there and wait around for Pietr to wake up,” Jackie offered, which only served to stoke my panicked ire.
“Thank you, Jackie,” I snapped. “I hadn’t put that part together yet. I was still stuck on the how do we know if two men with serious head trauma aren’t about to die in our flat.”
Jackie bristled a little then, her jaw clenching and unclenching, but she let out a slow breath and then looked over to Pietr.
“For what it’s worth, I think he’ll be okay.” She thrust her chin at our neighbour. “A knot like that means most of the swelling is on the outside, instead of against his brain.”
I looked at Pietr, who, while utterly senseless, seemed far better off than Sark, bloodied on the floor by the door.
“And him?” I nodded at Sark.
Jackie’s face hardened, and a chilling trace of her former ire was back. It was a twisted, hard-edged face that looked down at the fallen man, and couldn’t have looked less like the best friend I knew and loved.
“Who cares?” She glared down at Sark. For his part, Sark’s expression didn’t change as he continued to watch us with idiotic placidity.
“Hey, look at me.” My tone was firm enough tone to pull Jackie’s attention back to me. “I care.”
“Why?”
The question was delivered in a tone so flat and icy, so unlike the warm, bubbly Jackie, that I had to remind myself who I was talking to.
“First of all,” I began, squeezing patient calm into every syllable. “If he dies, we don’t know why he came or who will come looking for him. Second, he’s no threat to us right now, so killing him would be murder, and third, I’m hoping we haven’t decided that summary execution is ours to choose because I will have a problem with that.”
Jackie looked at me, her brown eyes stony, but as I met her gaze, they began to soften. Tears beaded in the corners of her eyes, and she raised her wounded hands to the sides of her head. Her gaze slid off of me, back to Sark, and then down to her hands as she held them out in front of her. Her mouth opened and closed, and then she nearly doubled over, bracing herself on her knees.
“I think I’m going to be sick,” she gasped. A handful of heartbeats later, we were both in the bathroom. Jackie curled around the toilet, evacuating her many helpings of shaiyah, while I held her hair back. Occasionally, I strained to look out and make sure Sark and Pietr were where we’d left them before Jackie’s violent retching brought me back.
When she had nothing left to give, Jackie slumped back against the wall, and I slid over to sit with my back to the doorframe. Pietr hadn’t moved, and Sark’s bleary stare had shuttered at some point, but I could still see them breathing. I filled a glass at the sink and gave it to Jackie, and she took it and sipped gingerly.
I suddenly felt painfully exhausted with my eyes burning and limbs feeling like lead. I rolled my head this way and that, stretching muscles I hadn’t realized I’d been clenching. As I did, I saw the room where Uncle Iry slept and wondered that he hadn’t been awoken by the ruckus. He must have been beyond exhaustion. While Jackie had been vomiting, I was pretty sure I’d heard the odd door open as one or the other neighbour finally poked their heads out, but we hadn’t left any evidence.
“I’ve got an idea,” Jackie croaked, but I raised a finger to my lips and then pointed to Uncle Iry’s door. She nodded and then gestured that we should go toward the kitchen. I rose and helped her stand, then stood in the portal to keep an eye on our unconscious patients.
“Okay,” Jackie began after her last swallow of water. “Pietr could wake up any second and so we need to get him to his flat—”
“I don’t feel right just dumping him there,” I said, but Jackie held up her hand, and I realized she wasn’t done and so quieted.
“Once he’s in there, we make an emergency call with his phone, say ‘I’ve been mugged, I’m hurt’, and then get out. The police will come and we are clear, at least on Pietr’s account.”
It wasn’t perfect, but I didn’t have a better plan. I looked back to our entryway where Sark’s blood was streaked across the rug, and then to Sark, who lay slumped on a patch of wooden floor, a spattering of blood around his head like a ghastly halo.
“And when the police start questioning the neighbours if they heard anything, what are we going to do with the wanted criminal on our floor?”
Jackie frowned and then moved to the pantry door. It had a series of deep shelves where we kept food and dishes. Quickly and quietly, she cleared the bottom shelf and lifted it from its moorings. She slid past me, grabbed Sark, and began to drag him toward the kitchen.
Sark snapped back to wakefulness as he slid into the kitchen, his good eye revealing a pupil so blown it looked black.
“What are you doing?” he hissed through mashed lips, as he began to struggle and then arched his body in pain at the movement. “What the f-”
Jackie let him flop to the kitchen floor, where he writhed in fresh pain, but it shut him up long enough for her to sink down in front of his face. His bulging eye watched her with open terror, but he kept his mouth clamped shut.
“Don’t make one more sound,” Jackie warned levelly. “If you want to live through the night, you better keep your mouth shut and do exactly what we tell you to. Understand?”
Sark’s eye narrowed to a venomous slit, but his head jerked up and down in acknowledgement. I didn’t know if Sark really believed she would kill him, but I don’t think he wanted to test the theory, and no one was more glad of that than me. Right then, I didn’t think I wanted to test her either.
“Ibby, you can probably move the rest of this stuff quicker than I can,” Jackie said, sweeping her hand to the cupboard. “I’ll move Pietr while you’re doing that.”
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“You think you can move him by yourself?” I asked with a frown, as I remembered how heavy he was just to get out of the hallway.
Jackie shrugged and moved toward the living room. “He may have a few more bruises before we’re done, but I’ll get him there.”
Almost on cue, Pietr groaned, and I heard him moving on the couch.
Jackie moved quickly to his side, and I could hear her talking like she was lulling a baby back to sleep. She did this between grunts and heaves, and I heard her staggering steps going to the door, which she somehow managed to shut behind her.
I’d been listening so intently I’d almost forgotten about my job, and I turned back to the pantry. Sark still lay on the floor, glaring up at me with his inhumanly dark eye, but I elected to ignore him as he seethed in silence.
Reaching out with my mind, I drew the chords that made the song of the metallic pots and pans in the panty, and with little effort had them gliding out soundlessly to rest on the kitchen counter. I was glad that I still had the Rings on my fingers, their power providing me greater control.
I eyed the space and then looked at Sark. It would be a tight fit, but not so much that I needed to be worried about his breathing or anything. Assessing him like this made it clear how far he’d fallen, something which I noted with only a hint of satisfaction. Sark had been a lean man, maybe a hair or two shorter than Jackie, when he’d first torn into my life. Now, he had shrivelled from lean to scrawny, his frame having lost the sculpted curves of sinew. His hair was lank and uneven, as though it had been cut by someone with neither the tools nor the training to do the job properly. His roots showed that his hair had been dyed, badly, a much lighter shade months ago. It was hard to tell all the changes worked on his face due to the swelling and blood, but his jaw was covered in wiry scruff, and his good eye was sunken in a bony socket. On top of all of this, the bouquet emanating from him was not the soft, subtle smell of designer cologne, but the pungent miasma of sweat, blood, and mildew.